FRYE, NORTHROP

born July 14, 1912, Sherbrooke, Que., Can. died Jan. 23, 1991, Toronto, Ont. in full Herman Northrop Frye Canadian educator and literary critic, author of influential theories of criticism. Frye was educated at the University of Toronto, Emmanuel College in Toronto, and Merton College, Oxford. He taught at Victoria College from 1939, became chairman of the English department there in 1952, and served as principal (195967) and chancellor (197891) of the college. He was also a visiting professor in many American universities. In 1947 he published Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, which was a sweeping and erudite study of Blake's visionary symbolism. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), he analyzed various modes of literary criticism and stressed the recurring importance of archetypal symbols in literature. In later works Frye studied T.S. Eliot (1963), John Milton's epics (1965), Shakespearean comedy (1965) and tragedy (1967), and English Romanticism (1968). The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society appeared in 1970, and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, a study of the mythology and structure of the Bible, was published in 1982. Frye's other critical worksThe Well-Tempered Critic (1963), The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976), Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), and Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990)similarly emphasize symbols and group myths in literature and the systematic classification of literary symbols, genres, and criticism.